10 Guaranteed Ways To Dominate YouTube Search

This week’s look at the Reel Web covers tips for YouTube SEO and several news stories from the online video world, including “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s” upcoming service, “Call of Duty Elite.” Their web shows sound amazing, but access to their video content and Elite TV will cost $50.

Netflix sticks it to their users again by restricting the number of simultaneous streams for household based on your subscription plan. Now users get a “streaming error” when trying to stream video content to multiple devices.

YouTube SEO Tips

We look at the YouTube Creator’s Playbook again and everything it says about how to influence YouTube’s algorithm. If you want your videos to rank well in YouTube search and be next to other related videos, here are the 10 strategies YouTube gives for how to rank well.

The Reel Web is a weekly look at the online video world. Every Monday we highlight the latest news as well as give video producer tips, advice, ideas, tutorials, tools, training and more for creating video content for the web that stands out from the rest.

On this week’s look at The Reel Web, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is going to release with its own web video series, which sounds awesome, and Netflix sticks it to all us users again, and what I’m most excited about is kind of summarizing what YouTube has recently released. It’s the best ways to optimize your videos for search, so that’s coming up.

Hey, guys! My name is Tim Schmoyer. And welcome to another week of The Reel Web, brought to you by ReelSEO.com. Every week we make a new video, just kind of highlighting the past news in the online video world, as well as giving you guys who create online video content some tips, and advice, and tools, and training, and everything else you guys need.

But before we jump into a couple stories and tell you guys exactly how YouTube says to optimize your videos for search engines, there’s something we need to take care of first. When we posted last week’s video, The Reel Web video episode, on our Facebook page last week, one of you guys commented saying this. Gosh, I can’t believe you guys think you can make a video without a kitten. Not sure I can trust your advice without a kitten. Get a danged kitten! (Music) I’m not really a cat fan. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on with it. Shall we?

If you make a video game that sells over 55 million copies and generates billions of dollars of revenue, you’ve probably proven pretty well that you have an audience that’s willing to throw some money at you. And if you have that audience, why not give them more reasons to throw more money at you? That’s exactly what Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is going to do with a couple of new web video shows it’ll be releasing alongside of the video game’s release on November 8.

With some of the top Hollywood movie producers on board, I can only imagine just how awesome and amazing these web shows are going to be. They’ll have shows of celebrities who have long standing rivalries against each other kind of duking it out to settle the score on Modern Warfare. They’ll also have shows where users and players submit their own videos, and different Hollywood actors are going to add their own commentary to your videos, kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos but for Call of Duty.

And while these Modern Warfare 3 shows sound like they’re going to be just dripping with goodness, they’re making one gigantic, critical, ultimate fail mistake, in my opinion. These videos will only be available as part of a paid service that’s releasing alongside of the game. The service will be called Call of Duty Elites, which will be mostly free, but to get Elite TV, you’ll have to choke up 50 bucks. Why would you take something that is so awesome and lock it behind 50 bucks? Just think how popular these videos could be on YouTube. I mean, it just sounds like pure marketing geniusness, unless, of course, millions of people are willing to pay 50 bucks to watch these videos. Then, in that case, that might be more geniusness. But I know I won’t be paying for it. Would you pay 50 bucks to watch these on Elite TV? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think, or click right here on video response. Is this a really stupid move on their part, or is this a genius move for them to make even more money based off the game’s popularity.

As if Netflix wasn’t already ticking off enough of their customers by raising prices, over Labor Day weekend, they decided to quietly roll out some new restrictions to their streaming service. Now, if you’re household is under the one DVD plan, you get one stream. If your household’s under the two DVD plan, then you get two simultaneous streams to different devices. And likewise, if you’re under the three DVD stream, you can stream up to three devices simultaneously. We all probably know about any explanation why Netflix is enforcing these streaming restrictions, but the total lack of communication, other than a streaming error, that’s just stupid. Surprise! You took away all the services you used to pay for, and now you don’t get them. I can clearly see where this is heading.

Last week I told you guys about this document right here, the YouTube Creator Playbook, and man, guys, this thing is just awesome. YouTube put all their best practices and best strategies and everything in one place, but what I want to focus on is some of the things that they mention that influence their search algorithm and how you guys can best optimize your videos to take advantage of some of those things.

One, likes and favorites increase your video’s ranking in search. Before we go onto our next one, why don’t you just go down there and click ours for us. Thanks.

Two,publishing content regularly will improve your ranking in the algorithm. So if you post inconsistently, you might want to change that.

Three, more content will lead to more viewership and better ranking in the algorithms. In other words, YouTube wants you to post a whole lot of stuff. There’s a whole section in this book about metadata and just how critical it is for building traffic from searches and related videos. How so specifically?

Four, write good titles. Put keywords first and branding at the end, but also make sure that your titles are compelling so people actually want to click on them.

Five, you also need to write really good tags. Include tags that are both very common and very specific that are also relevant to the video, and place the keywords that you want to carry the most weight, place them first. Use plenty of variations and use quotes and phrases in quotation marks. They recommend writing twelve tags or more and just using up that entire 120 character limit that they give you in that field. Also, mirror the title in the tags, using the same words in the same order that they appear in your title.

Six, what you write in the description is very important as well. Put your most compelling information first, and be sure to include plenty of keywords and length. Also in your description, make sure you include a link to your channel page, a link people can click to subscribe to your content, your social media links, and any other links that might be relevant to the content you’re presenting in your video. Click the Show more link below this video. That’ll expand, and you’ll see all the links that we’ve put up there for you. Also in your description, YouTube recommends that you include a recurring keyword tagline that is just a couple of sentences that summarizes what your show is about and also uses plenty of your keywords. And, if you like, you can always repeat or add additional tags to the bottom of your description, too.

Having your videos listed in playlists improves your content’s ranking in the algorithm.

Nine, having a lot of video responses posted to your content will also help increase your video’s ranking in search, so if you don’t mind, you can click right here and leave a video response answering the question I asked earlier. What do you think about Call of Duty’s decision to lock away their web series videos behind 50 bucks? Is that stupid or genius?

Ten, respond to comments in the first few hours after your video is published because building comments very early helps increase the video’s rankings in search. It’s easy for me because I love responding to comments. That’s what I like about YouTube most is the interaction and the dialogue we can have here together. So, please leave a comment below if you don’t leave a video response, and just let us know what you think about the videos and answer the question about the 50 bucks thing. I’m a little ticked at that, if you can’t tell.

If you didn’t listen to me earlier and actually check out the links in the description below this video here on YouTube, go check it out now because the link to this entire book from YouTube is down there if you want to download that. There’s also the link to the stories I shared earlier about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 shows and Netflix and whatever they’re doing. There’s also a link down there about the best branded videos of August of 2011. There’s a story down there about how you Canadians really don’t care for online video ads. And if you’re disappointed about Final Cut Pro 10 turned out, like I am, but you want to upgrade from your entry level software, there’s a video and a link down there you can check out that might help you with your decisions.

Here you go, my quick overview of Premier. As I use it more and get more used to it, I’ll give you guys some more looks at it. But so far, if you’re looking for a move away from Final Cut, I would highly recommend CS5.5

If you’re not already subscribed to our videos, make sure you click that subscribe button right up there, or you can click right there as well to stay up to date with our videos. We release them every Monday and Wednesday.

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